Correlation between sentence topic and discourse topic in French and Chinese: annotation issues and contrastive analysis

Abstract

AbstractThis paper aims to investigate the correlation between “sentence topic (ST)” and “discourse topic (DT)”, both based on an “aboutness” relation. It also compares the degrees of correlation between French and Chinese, considered respectively as a subject‐prominent and a topic‐prominent language. Kendall's correlation tests, Poisson models and z‐tests were conducted using manually annotated textual data. The results confirm a positive correlation between STs and DTs in both languages. Although the correlation coefficients are higher in Chinese, z‐tests' results do not show a significant difference between the two languages. We explain that the two languages differ not only in the more or less frequent topic‐comment constructions, but also in the choice of more or less accessible referential markers which represent the STs, or in the more or less tacit way that STs of different sentences are related to each other.